RotaryView: a 360-degree view of online retail

Israeli tech firm enables buyers to more fully see what’s on offer

By

RobertDaniel

TEL AVIV (MarketWatch)—A key piece of marketing technology for online retail these days enables merchants to display their wares 360 degrees around: Potential buyers can get a fuller look at products on offer by grasping and turning images or simply by viewing them as they revolve on screen.

Lots of firms are competing in this space, and one of them, Israeli start-up RotaryView, received the investment attention of Microsoft Corp.

The Israeli company on Thursday was set to launch its technology — including a new application version for mobile phones — at the software major’s Palo Alto, Calif., offices.

Microsoft,
MSFT, -1.33%
the Redmond, Wash., software major, early this year named RotaryView one of 10 companies admitted to its start-up-accelerator program and gave the company a grant of server space to help speed development of its system.

On Thursday, at what Microsoft calls Demo Day, the 10 companies, including RotaryView, were set to display their technologies for local investors.

“Case studies show people prefer to see products in all aspects” when they’re shopping online, helping them decide more confidently whether to buy, says Gev Rotem, chief executive of RotaryView.

The concept is relatively simple: An online retailer takes a series of photos of a product. And the photos are processed and uploaded so that on a website, the product gently spins independently or a viewer can grab the image and turn it for inspection.

Distinguishing the various technologies out there, however, are speed, convenience and cost, and Gev Rotem and his cousin, Gal Rotem, co-founders of RotaryView, say they’ve sharply improved the first two while lowering the third.

RotaryView

RotaryView Chief Executive Gev Rotem.

Gev Rotem, chief executive of RotaryView, is an attorney who founded a tech company that was recently acquired. The company’s three other partners are Gal Rotem, chief marketing officer and founder of the Israeli computer-graphics company Visual 3D; Chief Technology Officer Ofir Shefer, a user-interface specialist and a shareholder at Visual 3D; and Sharon Marko, an algorithm specialist from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science.

The Rotems argue that their patent-pending technology to convert flat photos to rotating images makes the process fast, painless and cheap.

Alternative technologies require a retailer to submit a product to a 3D-imaging-service provider. A photographer shoots the product and returns it to the retailer. A programmer then must upload a digital viewer to the retailer’s site. Or a retailer will buy a turntable and shoot the photos. A programmer must input the photos to the viewer and upload the viewer to the website.

In both cases, Gev Rotem says, the retailer either must know code to upload the viewers or lay out money and staff hours to have a programmer do this. The process is time-consuming, particularly if the product must be sent to another location for initial photos. And such players are digitally heavy and can stress a retailer’s servers, he says.

RotaryView method

RotaryView eliminates the exchange of product and takes virtually the entire process on to its servers.

A retailer places a product on any surface and takes photos — as few as 8, as many as an optimal 16 — of it from various angles. And she uploads them to RotaryView’s website.

The RotaryView technology cleans the background from the photos, making the product appear against a white space. And it generates an embed code, which the merchant embeds in her website code exactly as she would embed a YouTube video, Gev Rotem says.

Immediately, the product image spins on screen.

In the mobile version, a merchant downloads the app and places the product on a white surface. The app does the photography: Using motion-detection technology, it identifies when hands are in the frame to rotate the object and shoots the pictures only when the hands are outside the frame.

From there, the system is the same: RotaryView generates the embed code for the website and the merchant embeds it.

Importantly, Gev Rotem says, the photos are stored on RotaryView’s servers so as not to slow down the retailer’s site.

Maintaining the photos on RotaryView’s servers also enables consumers at retailers to immediately share the products they’re looking at with friends via social networks, Gev Rotem says. In turn, interested recipients of the product links can click directly back to the merchant’s site for purchase, he notes.

RotaryView’s business model is based on subscriptions, with websites paying according to the number of rotating images they have up.

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